As part of LMU Sustainability Week, we will hold a hybrid international GIST Hub lecture! The event will take place in English.
The link to join the event will be posted here well in advance of the event's start time.
The GIST Hub brings researchers from the LMU and the Pontificia Catholic University of Chile (UC) together to analyse how governance and innovation can contribute to more inclusive, sustainable transformations. This international lecture showcases two projects connecting Latin America and Germany.
The project “Green Supply and Innovation Networks between Germany and Latin America” provides a systematic mapping of firm-level collaboration between Germany and Latin America along value chains in the renewable energy, critical minerals, and green technologies sectors. European green transition depends not only on scaling renewable energy but also on forging resilient international partnerships for critical raw materials and green technology development. Latin America has become an important partner in this transformation, both as a supplier of critical minerals such as lithium and copper and as a co-architect of global sustainability agendas. Despite the growing policy emphasis on strategic partnerships and global value chains, little empirical evidence exists on the actual configurations of corporate collaboration, technological exchange, and value-chain integration between Europe and Latin America. Drawing on a unique business database, an intercontinental survey, and automated web-data analytics, the study explores vertical supply-chain linkages and horizontal cooperation structures, assessing how these relationships contribute to ecological, social, and economic sustainability. Anchored in the sustainability agenda, this study seeks to offer an empirical foundation for promoting inclusive and sustainable industrial development and inter-regional innovation. It further contributes to understanding social and technological innovation in the context of successful sustainability transitions.
The project “Political and economic geographies of renewables’ life cycles: public and private roles in EV battery reuse and recycling (EVBRR) planning” provides an overview of the current market for EVRR and the associated infrastructure on a global level. Within this overview, there is a focus on public and private roles in decisions on location, particularly in view of the limited number of dominant EV producers such as Tesla, BYD and SAIC, and battery producers (e.g. CATL, BYD), and the extent to which they engage in ‘producer responsibility’ for these batteries. The particular focus here is not on the engineering aspects of this life cycle per se, but the motivations generated by public policy, and managed by planning authorities, for the location of EVRR infrastructure. Currently, there are very few centres for battery recovery around the world since the revolution in electric vehicles is only now generating the volume of ‘end of life’ batteries to justify their presence. However, this type of infrastructure will increase over the following two decades with increasing rates of reuse and recycling. The evolution of this infrastructure within countries and regions will be closely followed over the coming decade and will require public policies to ensure that end-of-life vehicle batteries that retain capacity for other uses are used effectively and do not become unmanaged waste that scars the landscape, and may potentially raise risks of environmental toxicity. These decisions all involve political and economic geographical considerations.